Miss O'Grady

What will I be when I grow up? is a question I have never asked myself. Even in high school, after six years of Latin, four years of German, mountains of Tennyson and Shakespeare, Dickens and all those “guys,” calculus, logic, physics, I was not planning or analyzing, anguishing over my purpose in life. As I remember it, after six years at Girls’ Latin School in Boston (a tough public school) it was assumed you were headed to college.

I’m sure I never voiced my criteria to anyone, lest I disappoint them, but what I really wanted, in this order, was someplace where I lived away from home, someplace where there were men (understandable really!), someplace where I could dance, someplace where I could study languages (I thought I would translate for the United Nations and travel the world, dancing, yes, with all those men!).

But what I now know is that I wanted someplace where I could grow up to be like Miss Winifred O’Grady. Winnie was my German teacher all four years since the school only had one teacher for German and one for French (I think there were three for Latin). From the time we stepped over the threshold into her classroom, we were hers. We wanted to be the best German students she had ever taught. Hell, we wanted to be the best people she had ever known. The last time I saw her was at graduation, although I think that’s not a memory but an assumption. She must have been there.

I went on with my life: off to Middlebury to study languages (Russian, German) I have to this day done nothing with.

Last week an old high school classmate wrote to tell me Miss O’Grady had died. She thought I’d want to know since we both (Winnie and I) went to Middlebury. And then I remembered: I went to Middlebury because Winnie had gone there, because she recommended it to me and me to it, and the school gave me a full scholarship.

The obituary said Winnie was 101 years old, living on her own within walking distance of museums and the theater until the last few months. She’d stopped teaching a few years after I graduated and went on to work in a bookbindery for over 30 years, traveling the world—probably dancing. I don’t know about the men.

Sitting in my black leather chair, sipping red zinger tea, I look at the pile of books I always have stacked beside me—poems and stories, books about art and music—and think of Winnie. She wrote me once or twice at school. I never wrote back. Over the years I thought of contacting her, but it seemed so silly, a long-ago time, another world, and I felt like I had not become what she would have thought I might have been, could have been.

Last night I was guiding a discussion with 23 early childcare providers about children and conflict in a changing world. There were children’s books all around us: When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry, The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, Playing War. It occurred to me I have become exactly what Winnie was: someone who loves the feel and smell, the core, of books, someone who really lives her life, someone who, no matter where she is or what she does, is a teacher. She understood that, she saw that: The formal titles we give ourselves—mechanic, doctor, carpenter, CEO—mean little in the definition of who we really are. Sie würde nicht enttäuscht.

Annaliese Jakimides’ essay “Paying Attention to the Silver Lining” joins the voices of Elie Wiesel, Yo-Yo Ma, Sister Helen Prejean, and others in the new collection This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women.